Szechuan Story
An American Tale: Szechuan Goes West
Within any country, culinary regions and traditions specific to each exist. As people immigrate, a country’s regions can get boiled down into a monolithic representation that gets swapped around the world and loses its original complexity, like a game of telephone gone awry. What is Italian food? Well, that depends where you are in Italy. Mexican food? Are you in Oaxaca, Baja, Southern California, or Texas? Hell, what they call chili in Cincinnati is different than in Texas and barbeque in Memphis is a different beast than in North Carolina or Kansas City. Thanks to this phenomenon, there’s a perception amongst many Americans that Chinese food consists of the white and red take-out boxes of chicken fried rice and eggrolls. In reality, China has a dense cross-cut of cuisines, each highlighting the agriculture and traditions of their respective areas. Szechuan Story is proving that point.
Owner and Chef Peter Tan is from China’s Sichuan province, a sprawling part of the country’s central region that overlaps Tibet and has a population of over eighty million. He has worked in the restaurant industry for twenty plus years. Like many, he started at the bottom as a cook, moved up to assistant manager, and then decided it was time to open his own restaurant. Chef Tan came from Tsubaki Szechuan, which was a fantastic restaurant located in the mall adjacent to Super Cao Ngyuen. It was the kind of place where you’d go and see all the best chefs in town sitting at a table, ordering everything on the menu and having a feast. Eventually, the lease ended and they were looking for a better location, so 2800 NW Classen became just that.
The menu still leans traditional. There’s a common stereotype that Szechuan food is incredibly spicy, but it’s truly a different sensation. It’s not the same spice as dumping a bottle of habanero sauce onto your food. They have a regionally specific peppercorn that creates this numbing sensation. You still might shed a tear, but it’s a sensory effect, almost psychedelic in large amounts. It's not overpowering and you can still taste the star anise, cumin, and peppers. Some dishes can make you feel like you’re sitting in a hot tub full of flavorful spices, wondering if you should get out but experiencing too much enjoyment to stop.
The most popular appetizers are soup dumplings and scallion pancakes with chili oil to enjoy while you peruse the menu. Then, you should get some dry crispy chicken, double-cooked pork belly, and Mapo tofu to share with the table. For those who are a bit more adventurous, they offer offal as well. You can find kidney and pork intestine on the menu, which can be intimidating to some. But, my dining philosophy is that if you see something on a menu that sounds weird to you, they’re cooking it for a damn good reason and that means it’s worth trying.
>Szechuan Story, 2800 N Classen Blvd #108, Oklahoma City; (405) 604-4880; (szechuanstory.com)
